Abstract

This thesis is an examination of the religious, moral, and spiritual motivations that underpin an understanding of agency as meaningful action. Through a comparative study of the work of Charles Taylor and Judith Butler, two influential approaches in the contemporary debates over the self and agency, the study analyzes the problem of agency as action and freedom, as well as constitutive of moral, cultural, and political identities. In examining the religious salience of these approaches to questions of agency, I highlight the dynamic relationships between identity and the formation of values and norms. In calling agency "melancholic freedom" I focus on agency as arising from the losses and costs to subjectivity in modernity and post-modernity, specifically through the moral cultures that arise through secularization, liberalism, naturalism, and the valorization of difference. These losses are evident in Taylor's depiction of the moral identity of secularized modernity, for which estrangement and subsequent alienation result from a detachment from and lack of clarity about the moral ideals and higher goods, such as benevolence, justice, and freedom, that figure prominently in making judgments of value, worth, and affirmation. These losses also originate in the social, political, cultural, and even psychic alienation that Butler argues is at once the common experience of those who suffer the indignities of racial, gender, class, and sexuality discrimination and hatred, as well as the terrain on which agency is generated. I characterize the work of Taylor and Butler as projects of regenerating agency that require a commitment to the cultivation of religious attitudes and dispositions, in particular, vocation. Through a retrieval of Romantic tropes such as authenticity, irony, and the sublime, I develop a conception of the religious imagination: the faculty that enables the subjects of melancholic freedom to aspire to regenerate and realize agency and moral identities that seek to transcend constraints of varying kinds through the reawakening of a moral attunement to higher goods and values, as well as through the strenuous effort to live within yet also resist the oppressive conventions and customs of discrimination, such as sexism, homophobia, and racism